The CLEF Association

The CLEF Association is an independent no-profit legal entity, established in October 2013 as
a result of activity of the PROMISE Network of Excellence which backed CLEF from 2010 to
2013.

The CLEF Association has scientific, cultural and educational objectives and operates in the
field of information access systems and their evaluation. Its mission is:

to promote access to information and use evaluation;

to foster critical thinking about advancing information access and use from a technical, economic and societal perspective.

Within these two areas of interest, the CLEF Association aims at a better understanding of
the use and access to information and how to improve this. The two areas of interest stated in
the the above mission translate into the following objectives:

clustering stakeholders with multidisciplinary competences and different needs, including
academia, industry, education and other societal institutions;

facilitating medium/long-term research in information access and use and its evaluation;

increasing, transferring and applying expertise.

The CLEF Association pursues its mission and objectives via the four pillar activities shown above:

CLEF: sustains and promotes the popular CLEF evaluation series as well as providing
support for its coordination, organisation, and running;

Collections and Experimental Data: fosters the adoption and exploitation of large-scale
shared experimental collections, makes them available under appropriate conditions and
trusted channels, and shares experimental results and scientific data for comparison with
state-of-the-art and for reuse;

Infrastructure: supports the adoption and deployment of software and hardware
infrastructures which facilitate the experimental evaluation process, the sharing of experimental
collections and results, and interaction with and understanding of experimental data;

Education and knowledge transfer: organises educational events, such as summer schools,
and knowledge transfer activities, such as workshops, aimed not only at spreading know-how
about information access and use but also at raising awareness and stimulating alternative
viewpoints about the technical, economic, and societal implications.